amyo/tinyrage at Northwest Film Forum, March 26

For the second show in its “Live at the Film Forum” series, the Northwest Film Forum commissioned choreographer/dancer Amy O’Neal to create a live performance for its modest movie screen theater. O’Neal, whose dance company locust regularly incorporates the medium of video, proved a perfect choice for pushing the series’ genre-defying objectives forward. Few artists have been so successful at combining humor, pathos and philosophical inquiry in such a loose, wide-ranging format or have managed to instill it with such vitality.

Too often, dancers get lost in the vast digital backdrops they choose to surround themselves with. Worse, these visual landscapes can simply be a means of placing poorly-conceived choreography in a meaningful context. But O’Neal carefully integrates her two spheres of movement to create a dialogue where actions on stage engage those carried out beforehand and projected upon the walls. What’s more, the physical disparities between the live and the rebroadcast suggest fundamental epistemological questions at the heart of our emotions and cognitive states of being.

Such success is only possible, of course, when you’ve got some kick-ass dancers. For too – as the work is titled – O’Neal joins forces with her frequent collaborator, dancer and choreographer Ellie Sandstorm to create amyo/tinyrage. On stage together, the two resist being subsumed by their own moving, digital images (or those of stand-ins) filmed in faraway places. And this continued resistance provides the work with its underlying tension and structural dynamic as it is propelled forward by the haunting vocals with hard-driving rhythms of Ivory Smith’s richly textured score.

O’Neal and Sandstrom can both be described as no holds barred performers, but they possess different qualities and temperaments. O’Neal has an almost film noir, Hollywood studio quality while Sandstrom swings like a big band on its last set. Together, what a team they make.

The piece begins inauspiciously, with the two on stage moving more or less in unison with dancers in strange guises and forlorn locales on the screen behind them.

On screen, O’Neal dances some restrained steps with a tall man in front of a blue Victorian house under an overcast sky. Inside, she moves haltingly around a melancholy-looking older man who exhibits a strange fascination with her boot. The scene shifts to a group of women carrying out a series of stealthy movements in front of the abandoned Tee Pee Toy Novelty in the middle of God-know-where. More women appear, repeating these and other moves inside a home, behind a Texas bar, and on a remote park bench. Somewhere in a dreary office, O’Neal and Maktub singer Reggie Watts get down and mug for the camera as nearby workers stare obliviously into their computer screens. We then see her in an oversized men’s suit, dancing with a guy on the rooftop of an empty parking garage in the middle of an unknown city’s downtown.

On stage, O’Neal and Sandstrom execute their moves while going through numerous, seemingly random costume changes. Their style of dance has an abruptness, athleticism, and intensity but it also embraces an essential human awkwardness. Throughout the performance, O’Neal and Sandstrom manifest a defiant posture, as if staving off both the forces of gravity and the familiar pressures of life. As it unfolds, we can both feel the blues and sense the absurdity of their cause.

After culminating in a storm of newspapers strewn across the stage, the dancing grinds to a sudden halt. An intermission and recess in the sun-filled lobby gives the audience a moment to gather itself before returning to the seats.

Afterwards, the pace quickens and a deeper surrealism ensues. On screen, O’Neal and her cohorts are seen sprawled out on a circular rotating bed wearing matching Japanese Manga-girl dresses and sheer black knee-socks. As they turn, the scene is interspersed with snippets of murky footage from more hotel rooms that reveal vague figures striking more intimate poses. But the alluring promise of these visions gives way to further isolation and melancholy. From the stage, O’Neal and Sandstrom continue to assert themselves over this gathering mood and too suddenly changes course, becoming decidedly more spiritual and uplifting.

Salvation comes in the form of karaoke; a medium that breaks the social and artistic bounds between the performer and audience to establish new paradigms of self and community. O’Neal and Sandstrom move in sync with themselves dancing on screen in the midst of a decidedly all-star Seattle art karaoke smack-down. Smith’s score stands in for the actual soundtrack of the event, leaving the viewer to focus instead the participants’ movement and the group interaction. It’s a party to be sure, but one that takes on qualities of down-home Pentecostal reverie.

Is there, I ask, a more radical place for a contemporary dance piece to find itself?